Task management vendor Asana is adding features designed to appeal to enterprises. The features include a better view of team activities by both managers and employees, and oversight capabilities for administrators.

The new features are part of a collection of -targeted functions collectively called Organizations. The Team Browser features, for instance, allow employees to see all the projects in which they're engaged in order to prioritize, and managers can view all the current projects at the company.

In a posting on the Asana company blog, business and operations head Kenny Von Zant wrote Wednesday that, when the 18-month-old company launched its first premium tiers about a year ago, it enabled mid-sized teams from 10s to 100s of people to go further with the software. When the software first launched in 2009, the software had been designed for teams of up to 30 people.

From Hundreds to Thousands

The company was co-founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and to date has raised about $40 million in venture funding. Asana said that its -based software has been used by thousands of teams to generate more than 55 million tasks and more than 85 million messages.

Asana's point of view is that the management of tasks is the key collaborative need in workplaces, and that, in spite of elaborate collaborative tools, many organizations were still relying on e-mail, physical notebooks and whiteboards to track project workflows.

He added that, although the software has been used in a range of industries, "we haven't been ready to support the largest teams, those that grow from 100s to 1,000s of people."

Flexible Teams, Saved Searches

The new Organizations collection of features also allows team building to be more flexible, so that anyone in the company can organize a new team and can invite new or existing Asana members to become members. Teams can be public for anyone to join, or can be set up so that members have to be approved by an existing team member or have to be invited. Projects can now be readily moved between Teams.

There is also now a single Inbox, and a user can search across an organization and save the searches. New users who sign up with a company's e-mail domain address in their e-mail will automatically be listed as part of that organization. They'll be given access to available teams, and will have the ability to create their own teams.

Organizations that are signed up for premium versions can also now set up users as administrators, so that they can manage users, centralize billing, see account activity, remove users, require access through Google Accounts, or configure some of the settings.

Asana is available in free and premium tiers, either at $15/monthly for 15 users or at a rate for an entire organization. With these new features, the free tier is being upgraded, such that teams up to 15 members have access to most of the new enterprise features.

Asana is known because of its name not for its services. Better option is ProofHub. It wins in every aspect from asana whether in features or in service.

Lucy Mark:

Posted: 2013-07-31 @ 5:12am PT

I agree with you Simon. Proofhub is lot better in terms of collaboration instead of asana. I have used asana but it didn't quite do as much for us as Proofhub does. I am fully committed to proofhub now.